For the love of god

[halo1941]

I have 2 hard drives and want XP on one and Linux on the other. my friend insists I need to somehow make both HD's one partition because for some reason he wants linux to not see 2 HD's. He's an "expert" he claims but can't explain wtf to do. Can someone explain how I can get Linux and XP on a dualboot? About to have a breakdown.

[bdg1983]

That`s BS. I have to different hard drives, and linux reads them both just fine. You can partition them anyway you like and both linux and xp will read them fine. Until recently I had xp and linux on the same box, with two harddrives and it works fine. Exept for windows, so now I just run linux, but that`s another story :D
But seriously .. you do not need to make them one partition.
Just give linux the native and swap it wants and you will be fine.
One tip though : install XP first, then linux

[halo1941]

Ok thx dude,
But I am a complete newbie. I have the iso burned to a cd. And Xp is installed on my PC. What do I do next?

[bdg1983]

Oki .. this is what you do :

Boot the iso.
In the boot run fdisk og cfdisk. Being a newbie I suggest cfdisk. Create at least two partitions :
One swap and one or more native.
The run the setup.

The first steps there are for the slackware setup. In red hat, suse and mandrake you can do the partitioning farily easy with disk druid. you will be asked for that when the time comes.
If you have plenty of space you can make one partition to contain just / (root) and one to contain /home. This is generally a good idea.

When the partitioning is done, you just setup and follow the instructions on the screen.

When you are I suggest you make a bootdisk. When installing the bootloader I would recommend using lilo. I dont know your distro, but lilo is very good.
Installing lilo to the MBR is suicide when it comes to dual boot, but install it to a floppy could be a good idea and definately very safe.
When you boot up the first time you might have to use the bootdisk, and then install lilo. It depends on the distro.
What distro are you going to use btw ?
Hope I`m being some help here
;)

[mrBen]

Depends which distro you have. If it's a fancy one it'll come with its own partion program, in which case restart your machine, set the BIOS to boot from CDROM, whack in the drive and let it fly :) If it's not so flash, then they usually supply FIPS, a DOS based repartioning tool, but I don't know if you can run it under XP - try searching Google for 'fips XP' or 'linux xp' and see what you come up with.

Linux doesn't really view partitions in the same way as windows. It has a file system, and you assign partitions to your directories. On one partition you would just have /, and then your XP can be mounted where you like, say /mnt/XP/. Or you could have 2 partitions and mount one of them as /home for your home directory. But you don't get c drive and d drive like you do in windows, just one big filesystem.

[halo1941]

Thx alot for the info. I am using slackware on the advice of my friend. But i'm starting to think maybe I should do Red Hat cuz there seems to be more support out there for it. If I choose Rad Hat, I'm gonna go with Server cuz I want to learn how to host with Linux.

[bdg1983]

Slackware ?
I started out with slackware and I`m back to it now, but I guess most people would agree that it isn`t the best distro to start with.
Personally I`d recommen SuSE. Easy to install and everything. But .. you really should try out some and the decide which one you favour.
I`ve tried SuSE, Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian and Slackware, and I find slackware the best, but .. I had frustrating hours when starting with slackware at first
Good luck :)